Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan (Asian America)

A transpacific history of clashing imperial ambitions, Contraceptive Diplomacy turns to the history of the birth control movement in the United States and Japan to interpret the struggle for hegemony in the Pacific through the lens of transnational feminism. By telling the story of reproductive politics in a transnational context, Takeuchi-Demirci draws connections between birth control activism and the history of eugenics, racism, and imperialism.. As the birth control movement spread beyond national and racial borders, it shed its radical bearings and was pressed into the service of larger ideological debates around fertility rates and overpopulation, global competitiveness, and eugenics. By the time of the Cold War, a transnational coalition for women's sexual liberation had been handed over to imperial machinations, enabling state-sponsored population control projects that effectively disempowered women and deprived them of reproductive freedom. expansionism, exceptionalism, and anti-communist policy and was welcomed in Japan as a hallmark of modernity. In this book, Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci follows the relationship between two iconic birth

. Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci is a Lecturer at Stanford University

Takeuchi-Demirci decenters the story of the birth control movement from the America-centric view characteristic of American scholarship, showing how the birth and population control work of Margaret Sanger, American NGOs, and the US government depended on collaboration with Japanese and Japanese-American colleagues." (Barbara Molony Santa Clara University)"This fine book explores the complex and often counter-productive alliance between the birth control movement and population control/eugenics advocates in Asia, Japan in particular. A major addition to the scholarship." (Linda Gordon New York University) . Its